Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual abuse.
It was after the daily 9 p.m. head count at the California Institution for Women in Chino that she was taken from her cell by a correctional officer who thought she was her friend.
He was 21 years old and didn't even weigh 100 pounds and the officer, who was about 6-foot-7, was twice his size. “It was unheard of that they arrested him after the head count. “I knew something was going on,” he said. “He told me that the lieutenant wanted to see me.”
But when he reached the office, it was already dark. “She started kissing me and put her tongue in my mouth,” the woman said, recalling the 2014 incident. The Times is not naming her because she is the victim of a sex crime. She “she put her hand in my pants. I tried to back away, but he was persistent. He then put his fingers inside me.” The next day, she said, he acted as if nothing had happened.
The woman is one of 130 former inmates at the Chino and Chowchilla women's prisons in California who are suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and more than 30 current and former correctional officers they say abused them in prison. They seek unspecified damages for sexual assault, battery, negligence, infliction of emotional distress and civil rights violations.
Correctional officers at the California Institution for Women in Chino and the Central California Women's Facility committed widespread sexual abuse against the detainees in their custody, according to a lawsuit filed last month. In many cases, officers assaulted and allegedly isolated inmates and forced them to perform sexual acts, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit documents graphic incidents of sexual abuse dating back a decade and reveals that women, when they were most vulnerable, were punished and sometimes subjected to further abuse and punitive actions if they reported their attackers.
“Every woman's worst nightmare is being locked inside a facility full of sexual predators with no way to escape,” said Doug Rochen, an attorney at ACTS Law who represents the women. “And that is exactly what each of these women, and probably thousands more, were subjected to for decades. “California paid no attention to their well-being, left them to suffer at the hands of the worst types of sexual deviants, and made them relive their pain daily while locked behind bars.”
The lawsuit accused a Chino prison sergeant of more than 40 rapes (incidents of violence that often caused bleeding) and sexual misconduct involving a female inmate in 2015. Fearing retaliation and further confinement, one plaintiff, identified only like Jane CL -1 25 Roe, she never reported sexual misconduct, assuming that complaints would be “unanswered, dismissed, ignored, and buried without investigation or redress, thus allowing sexual misconduct to continue.”
One of the women is the victim of an accused serial rapist correctional officer, Gregory Rodriguez, who is accused of 96 counts of sex crimes involving nearly a dozen women at Chowchilla Prison during his tenure, the lawsuit alleges. In 2014, the 27-year-old woman was allegedly forced to perform oral sex acts on the guard at a time when she was pregnant, according to the lawsuit.
Another woman alleges she was sexually abused by then-correctional officer Israel Treviño in 2014, when she was 25 years old. Treviño was fired in 2018 after other sexual abuse allegations. Several pending lawsuits accuse Treviño of abusing numerous victims. Trevino has already died.
That same former inmate, identified as Jane MS0 8 Roe, alleges that she was also the victim of two other correctional officers, one who groped her and another who groped her and penetrated her vagina, according to the lawsuit.
The sexual abuse would occur in areas of the prisons, including cells, closets and storage rooms, the lawsuit alleges. In the case of one alleged victim, she was sexually assaulted in a cleaning supplies closet five times and eventually reported it to another correctional officer, who refused to take action. Rochen said she was part of a pattern of correctional officials who systematically ignored reports of sexual abuse.
California corrections officials did not respond to a request for comment on the litigation.
Sexual abuse of incarcerated women is a widespread problem in facilities across the country; Government surveys suggest that more than 3,500 women are sexually abused by prison workers each year.
In addition to sexual misconduct by correctional workers, the lawsuit alleged that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had inadequate hiring practices, procedures and training to prevent sexual conduct and abuse.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series targeting sexual abuse in California women's prisons. Last summer, another law firm filed litigation involving more than 100 plaintiffs, including victims of Rodriguez.
State law gives victims of sexual assault by police and correctional officers up to 10 years after their attackers have been convicted of sexual assault or a crime in which sexual assault was initially alleged. Victims can also sue up to 10 years after their attackers left the police agency where they worked when the assault occurred.
